A Walk Through an Empty Hotel

 There isn’t much to talk about, but I want to share a few thoughts and some background.

When I travel to my cabin in the mountains, I cross the Czech–Slovak border for a short part of the trip. Right there stands an old hotel. I usually call it “communist style” — big, grey, ugly, built without any real architecture. These hotels were built during communism, and many of them are struggling today. People want nice places to stay, and these big concrete buildings are expensive to run and no longer in demand. Nobody really wants to stay in old retro hotels like this.

I’ve been passing this place for a few years. Sometimes I stopped and took photos of the area around it — an old tennis court, abandoned cars, empty barn. Everything slowly decaying. This year I noticed that the back door was open. Last time it was closed, so I assumed someone had broken in. I’m not an urbex photographer, but I was curious if there might be something worth photographing inside.

What you see here is the result.

The place was already damaged — sprayed walls, broken things, cracked surfaces. Still, there were clothes, linen, and everyday objects left behind.

I suspected that it was YouTubers — kids breaking into places like this, filming videos, and putting them online. And I was right. When I searched “abandoned hotel Slovakia,” it was easy to find videos from this exact hotel. What surprised me was how good the condition still was back then. I noticed that the YouTubers are asking for payment in exchange for sharing the exact location of abandoned places like this.

This is how places get destroyed today: someone puts it on the internet, others come, and they break things just for fun. Yes, I feel bitter about that.

Two weeks after this photo shoot, I stopped there again on my way to the cabin. Sadly, the place was in much worse condition. Almost everything was broken and messed up. I didn’t take a single photo. I don’t take photos of mess.

So this is just a sad story. At least these photos show a bit of the old atmosphere the place once had.